 Practicing evidence-based medicine is essentially illusion because the evidence we'd like to have that we need to make informed decisions about which drugs to take, to prescribe, to put into our bodies, that evidence isn't always out there. Drugs that are prescribed every day in the world, only about half the evidence that exists around that drug has been published. First and that, the evidence that is out there, is twice as likely to favour the drug. So it's a bit of a trick coin, as one really famous researcher has called it, health care is trick coin, where you flip that coin but it's got two heads on it, as opposed to one, and therefore you may not be making a very evidence-based decision about is this drug safe, is this drug effective, is this drug worth putting in my body. Think of even companies for example, other companies who might learn that one of their competitors has already done this research. If that research is varied, that goes to waste, the other company can learn from it and make smarter decisions. People are hurt by this, the people who participated in the research who thought they were going to help others, even if the drug that they were taking as part of the experiment didn't help them, at least the knowledge would help them, well that isn't possible if we have this kind of secrecy. Researchers who don't want to duplicate their colleagues' work, regulators like Health Canada are hurt by this, it undermines their credibility, it undermines the trust that the public should have in them if they keep this information secret. And lastly, essentially everyone else, everyone who's ever taken a drug in their lives is impacted by this because the information about that drug may not be the full story, and if we want to give them the opportunity to really decide is this drug right for them, for physicians to decide whether it's appropriate to prescribe it, we need to have that information out there. The best way to explain why it needs to be disclosed is to use an example. There are actually lots of examples, but here's a really powerful one. So it involves a drug called peroxatine, or paxil as its brand name. That drug was approved in the 1990s all over the world for the treatment of depression. Treatment of depression amongst adults, not younger people. Health Canada, our Canadian drug regulator, approved it for adults as elsewhere. They did not approve it for younger folks, but as that drug was being used in practice, as physicians were running into adolescence that seemed to exhibit depression-like symptoms, they started to think maybe this drug will work for those folks too, so even though it wasn't approved by Health Canada to treat younger people, physicians looking for a solution made that decision to prescribe it to adolescents as well. The problem was that there was actually evidence which our regulator and other regulators had that suggested it had the opposite effect. So for younger folks, this particular drug maybe increased the risk of self-harm, the risk of thinking about suicide. Physicians thought they were trying to help, but they were actually introducing greater risks for those younger folks. So I've been working on this issue for the last five or six years, and I started working on this issue because I went to a meeting held by Health Canada and a bunch of people were talking about what the law is, what information could be shared, and I wasn't sure that that conversation was very well informed. And so I thought a very simple thing I could do would be to clarify what the law actually says in Canada. Can Health Canada share this information? Are there any barriers to sharing this information? The biggest thing to do is really to keep pushing for policy change. A few years ago Parliament was making major changes to Canada's drug laws, but the bill it was considering had nothing in it about transparency. So myself and some others wrote about that, and our paper was cited in debates in the House in Commons, and the bill was amended, amended in committee to include several provisions that made our drug system much more transparent, in theory at least. The real work remains in ensuring those changes translate into changes in practice. Ultimately I want to get people excited about joining the field of drug law and policy. It's kind of amazing. We have news stories about drugs every day, about them being too expensive, about us not knowing what the evidence behind a drug is, about moving one drug from being a narcotic and illegal to something that we might use to treat certain kinds of diseases. But we have actually very few people that work on drug policy day in, day out, where legally trained in Canada. But we need more tort lawyers, we need more lawyers working in consumer protection organizations, and we need more legal scholars that have expertise and things to say about drug policy in Canada. We've been really thin, and so one of the most useful things I think I hope to achieve is to get a lot more people excited about this field and see if we can push pharmaceutical laws and policies and institutional practices like the ones that are used by our regulator Health Canada in much more progressive directions.